Is the iPad 'iBad for freedom'?

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Defective by Design.org has slammed the iPad just hours after its release, saying its "iBad for freedom".

In an online petition and an open letter to Steve Jobs, the open source organisation says: "The iPad's unprecedented use of DRM to control all capabilities of a general purpose computer is a dangerous step backward for computing and for media distribution. We demand that Apple remove all DRM from its devices."

Defective by Design.org is a campaign of the Free Software Foundation. GNU founder Richard Stallman is its president.

The website says the iPad uses what it call "Digital Restrictions Management" in two ways. First, all media in the iTunes store (with the exception of music) is wrapped in Apple's DRM.

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